Control, Violence and Coercion
"Victims of trafficking are controlled by acute violence, psychological intimidation, and threats to the families of the victims" (Shelley, 2010). Traffickers deprive victims of their identities, while moving them vast distances away from their home country and families into countries with different cultures and languages where they live in inhumane conditions and are tortured and induced to compliance. As many victims initially try to escape and refuse to comply with the traffickers demands, the trafficker may retain services of particularly violent criminals, "Violence specialists" to rape and beat the women repeatably after they reach their destination" to coerce the women into compliance.
"Victims of trafficking are controlled by acute violence, psychological intimidation, and threats to the families of the victims" (Shelley, 2010). Traffickers deprive victims of their identities, while moving them vast distances away from their home country and families into countries with different cultures and languages where they live in inhumane conditions and are tortured and induced to compliance. As many victims initially try to escape and refuse to comply with the traffickers demands, the trafficker may retain services of particularly violent criminals, "Violence specialists" to rape and beat the women repeatably after they reach their destination" to coerce the women into compliance.
Victims rarely seek assistance for multiple reasons. Primary reasons include:
- Traffickers routinely confiscate the victims passports and documents, if they are available. Without these documents, the trafficked victims has no legal status or identification. Loss of identity is central to the dehumanization of the victim. Causing barriers for criminal investigators in the recipient countries to investigate the trafficking network without evidence of the victims country of origin.
- Barriers in not knowing the language of the host country or lacking the capacity to reach law enforcement.
- Engrained fear of law enforcement based on experiences in their own country causing them to lack confidence that they will obtain assistance in the country in which they are trafficked.
- “Even if victims do come into contact with law enforcement or social services, they are usually reluctant to seek help, partly a result of psychological coercion but also because they fear retribution from the trafficker” (United States Department of Justice, 2006 as cited in Jones 2006).
The violence that traffickers commonly use to coerce and control the trafficked victim has been compared to the cycle of violence that characterizes domestic violence relationships. Women are beat, raped, and killed if they try to escape, refuse to have follow the traffickers demands or those of the clientele. It is especially dangerous for the victims if they try to escape, or if the trafficker believes she is trying to escape.
Victims are hardly ever returned their freedom from sexual slavery. Often times they are trafficked into other countries or different sectors; brothels, street prostitution. Most often these women contract serious life threatening diseases, causing them to return home or live within the slums of the host country and with HIV/AIDS, as leading the death toll of former sex slaves. In regions where HIV/AIDS is at extreme rates of transmission, trafficked women who have born children are dying, leaving behind children in the hands of brothel owners who controlled their deceased mothers. These children have no futures outside the lives of forced begging, prostitution or crime (Shelley, 2010). The spread of AIDS has also increased the demand for younger victims, as many customers believe that younger victims are less likely to be carriers of the infection. Consequential, the search for younger victims increases the likelihood that younger girls will be trafficked at ages as younger than 10yrs old.
A rarity in circumstance allows the opportunity for certain sex slaves to enter an agreement with their trafficker. Termed as secondary ruse, the trafficked women convince their captors to let return home and recruit new women. Sickening but true, these women have very few, if any options for escaping their enslavement, “to escape the horror of being forced to have sex with multiple men every day, some victims make this deal with the traffickers—thus moving from the victim to perpetrator status, even though they still remain under the control of the traffickers (Hughes, 2000, as cited in Jones, 2007).
Once engaged in prostitution, trafficked women and girls employed in brothels throughout the world are often forced to serve as many as thirty clients a day during a 12-14 hour work day and trafficked women are often denied the right to use any protection (Shelley, 2010).
Furthermore, being raped or being a prostitute brings shame to the girls and their families, creating difficulty for girls and women who are returned from home from removed trafficking and forced to return to their home countries leading to consequences such as girls being disowned by their families, and possibly ostracized by both their family and the community (Chung, 2009).
Furthermore, being raped or being a prostitute brings shame to the girls and their families, creating difficulty for girls and women who are returned from home from removed trafficking and forced to return to their home countries leading to consequences such as girls being disowned by their families, and possibly ostracized by both their family and the community (Chung, 2009).